Data management systems are well known. Currently there are various limitations in accessing, finding, aggregating, integrating and personalizing the management of content which is published, updated, consumed, syndicated or distributed on the web by individual users, organizations and various third-party content and media service providers. Consider, the intersection of following problems in the media, internet services and open source development space: (a) proliferation of user-generated content that is published and consumed over the web; (b) the need to design, customize, and deploy user-generated web applications that process user-generated content; (c) the need to enable searching for relevant web applications and content in a personalized and contextualized way; (d) the need to aggregate content across multiple contexts identified descriptively or directly. All of these needs motivate the development of a new data management approach. It is desirable to have a data management system that supports the management, storage, access to and sharing of various kinds of information types that are available over the internet via distributed, shared applications hosted within a networked environment such that (1) the management and access of all kinds of content can be personalized via semantic components, (2) scaled in terms of both the types of content and volume of content, (3) be flexibly accessed by means of relationships as well as properties, and (4) adapt to evolution of data systems in terms, for example, of content structure changes. None of the currently available data management systems provide such capabilities. There is also a need for a data management system that is able to manage data in a personalized and context specific way for both traditional business data (e.g., in real-estate application services, banking and financial services, B2B e-commerce services such as supply chain and inventory management) and consumer-oriented data (e.g., in B2C e-commerce services, social networking and media domains) which is not provided by existing systems.
Furthermore, for managing an increasing amount of user-generated and third-party generated content that is accessible and published over the web in conjunction with capabilities of allowing users to design, deploy and evolve their applications, current data management systems (for example using an object-relational database systems based on the SQL) will have various challenges to cut operational and maintenance cost when employing a traditional database engine to manage user's content. For example, it is desirable to reduce storage cost, server hardware cost, network bandwidth cost and database application work/overhead cost. It is desirable to provide a data management system that achieves these reductions in operational and maintenance costs.
For a data management system, it is also desirable to extend query language semantics using type-aware query language that can handle extensibility of data types which is not scalable with existing data management systems. Traditional data management system, for example based on object-relational database management system (O-RDBMS), have issues of scalability as more and more types are added to the system, as each type requires its own DB table and many queries have to cross all types.
Further it is important to enable the modeling of context. The key barrier to scalability in many computing systems is the ability to partition the set of data into smaller subsets within which most activity can take place. A data management system which exploits this fact in the interest of performance and scalability is required.
In traditional database systems when a client asks a question regarding some information of interest it is not possible to retain the meaning of the question when the client transitions from one context to another context. This is needed to allow user-generated applications that are designed and customized by and for a particular user, and to be re-used by other users. The data management system and method described below achieves these goals and it is to this end that the data management system and method are directed.